Somebody on Reddit was asking for scenes in the woods that could occur in a Blair Witch-style scenario, where the Agents are lost in the woods and trying to find their way out, and things get weird for them. I kind of got inspired and came up with the below.
- The Agents keep seeing somebody ahead of them who's holding a flashlight, but they're so far ahead that they can't make out who it is, and they don't stop no matter how loud the Agents yell. If the Agents charge fast enough, they only find the flashlight lying on the ground, still on.
- As the Agents proceed, the full moon seems to shift in the sky - one minute it's in front of them, then they walk for five minutes and it seems to be behind them. If anybody succeeds in a Survival or Navigate roll, or has any points in Science: Astronomy, they'll realize that there's two moons in the sky. If all of them look into the sky at the two moons, one of them suddenly flickers out, leaving only one behind. (Hat tip to the movie The Endless.)
- One of the Agents becomes absolutely sure that the moon is watching them from the sky, like an enormous, unblinking eye, and has to make a Sanity roll to avoid hiding from its awful gaze. Who's watching when, just for a second, it seems to blink?
- A stag stumbles towards them, its intestines hanging out of an enormous wound in its belly; it croaks out something that sounds like a word, then drops dead. Are the wounds from a bear, or something worse? And what was the word?
- There's a drumming noise in the distance, but it's irregular - sometimes very fast, sometimes irregular and slow. It begins to become more steady when one of the investigators realizes that it's synced to their own heartbeat, and rises and falls with their pulse.
- They find a fairy circle of mushrooms, each mushroom arranged exactly two feet away from the skeleton of a fox. The skeleton shows visible signs of deformation - the left side of the skull has two eyesockets, and the ribcage has too many ribs.
- They find an abandoned campsite, with a crude firepit littered with empty beer bottles and cigarette butts. There's empty .30-06 shells scattered around the nearby area, and a successful Search roll finds a rifle raggedly broken in half as if by some tremendous force. Underneath the rifle, there's a skeletal human lower arm and hand, that's clearly been chewed on for a while; the marrow has been sucked out.
- The Agents find a cell phone lying on a nearby dead tree, seemingly placed so that they notice it. It still has a little bit of juice left in it, long enough for the Agents to watch a video of teenagers clowning around with flashlights before one of them is suddenly pulled up into the trees. The video ends with a freshly severed leg falling out of the trees and onto the ground before the cellphone goes dead.
- The Agents find a tree with the bark stripped off, and I CAN'T GET OUT carved into the blank wood underneath.
- The Agents find a tree with the face of an Agent perfectly rendered into the bark, as if the tree spontaneously grew into that shape. The face is screaming in agony. Or maybe it's perfectly serene, accepting. As the Agents proceed, the other Agent's faces are found in the bark, then the faces of others that the Agents don't know.
- The Agents notice that the trees here are a lot bigger than before, and seem to get larger and larger as they continue to walk, until they're the size of redwoods. Looking up, the trees seem to go up forever, with only a tiny patch of starry sky visible seemingly miles away.
- The Agents find a wrecked, abandoned car that's been thoroughly overgrown, left here to rot for years. A tree sprouts through the empty space where the engine used to be.
- The Agents become aware that there's small animals watching them, their flashlights reflecting from their eyes. Most of the animals have two eyes. A few have three, or more. They scamper away into the darkness after a few seconds.
- The Agents find a complete set of clothing that's been left behind to rot in the grass, seemingly for months. It matches up exactly with what one of the Agents is wearing, down to any identifying marks made on the Agent's clothing. (I did come up with this one before seeing Backrooms, I should note.)
- One of the Agents becomes convinced that a tree is now occupying a space that it wasn't a second before - is he just disoriented from only seeing what's lit by his flashlight? Maybe.
- A sizable moth beats itself against somebody's flashlight for a few seconds, then flies off again.
- The remnants of some litterbug's picnic, with trash strewn around the plastic cloth on the ground. The trash looks exactly like normal food wrappers, except written in an alphabet that the Agents have never seen before. Anthropology or Archaeology rolls reveal that it's no recognized human language. Or maybe they're all in Linear B.
- What looks like blood is slowly oozing out of an old bullet hole in a tree. Tasting it results in the Agent hearing a constant low conversation that they can't make out while they're in the forest. Get it to the lab, and it's just tree sap.
- Every blade of grass, every sprouting plant, every dropped twig is leaning in one direction in this glade. They're not pointing to anything. Probably.
- Somebody's disassembled a sizable wind chime and has restrung it from a tree branch. Between each chime is a human bone. When the wind blows, the noise the chimes make seem to to echo for a long time, as if they're in a much larger space than just this clearing. An Alertness roll reveals that the noise sounds like it's bouncing off the walls of a titanic cathedral.
- The characters can see a set of blinking red lights through the trees, arranged into a vertical straight line - the warning lights on a cell phone tower, or power pylon. One of the lights detaches itself from the line and flies off, irregularly.
- An ancient television that somebody threw away, resting on a stump. A crude glyph has been painted on the cracked screen - it seems to depict somebody huddled over, as if they're trying to avoid the notice of something much larger. It takes a successful Sanity roll to tear your attention away from it once you've seen it.
- They find tire tracks leading to the remains of a pyre, apparently the aftermath of somebody's party in the woods. It looks like they were burning Mythos tomes for fuel, but none of them have survived the fire. (Or maybe one or two have.)
- A trio of deer suspended from a branch, their throats freshly cut and their guts lying on the ground beneath them. No sign of the hunters.
- Actually: After the Agents discover the trio of deer hanging upside down, they wander around for a while doing whatever. Then they find a trio of hunters, their throats slit, dangling upside down from a tree with their guts in a pile beneath them. There’s a discarded, stained paper plate with a piece of raw meat on it that’s been rubbed thoroughly with Buttery Garlic steak seasoning. It’s from one of the hunters.
- They find a body crumpled at the foot of a tree - maybe it's a park ranger, maybe it's a cultist, maybe it's a hunter. The tree has had most of the accessible bark removed, and the wood underneath has been carved with hundreds of lines of writing, not in English. There's a Swiss army knife nearby, with all of the blades broken off, coated in sap and wood pulp. The corpse's fingers are horribly damaged, with the distal phalanages visible. When the knife broke, he used his fingernails, and when his fingernails couldn't do the job…
- There’s bear traps all over the place, but there’s been no attempt made to hide them. They’re covered in Christian crosses and excerpts from the Bible, written in what looks like house paint. All of them are unsnapped, except for the last one they find - the bear trap has snapped, but there’s nothing in it. There is a sizable, circular indentation in the crest of the jaws that would match a human limb, melted into the metal of the trap, as if the trap closed around something tremendously hot. There’s an oversized footprint of what looks like a goat hoof nearby, stinking of brimstone. (This one might not be mine - I think that I’m remembering it and thinking of it as my own.)
